From the Magazine

When Michael Crichton Reigned over Pop Culture, from ER to Jurassic Park

When Michael Crichton died at 66, he was the master of writing, directing, and producing the scientific thriller. Now, with Crichton’s Westworld reincarnated as an HBO hit, Sam Kashner remembers the entertainment giant.

MAKING PREHISTORY
Michael Crichton at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, in 2004.

By Blake Little/Contour/Getty Images.

Imagine. An amusement park where you can be hunted by a
velociraptor—make that two velociraptors—or step gingerly over the
tail of a sleeping T. rex, like the characters do in Jurassic Park. Or
be dropped to the bottom of the ocean, as in Sphere, or ride atop a
fast-moving train in Victorian England, as in The Great Train Robbery.
Or be shuttled on a fast-moving gurney, like the patients in ER.

Welcome to Crichton World, which continues to flourish even after
Michael Crichton’s death from cancer, in 2008, at the age of 66, after a
staggeringly prodigious career as a writer and director of science-based
thrillers.

There has never been anyone quite like him in the history of the movies.
In his lifetime Michael Crichton wrote 18 major novels, most of them
best-sellers, including The Andromeda Strain, The Great Train Robbery,
Jurassic Park, Congo, Disclosure, and Sphere. His books have sold more
than 200 million copies worldwide, and 13 of his novels were made into
major films, many of them huge financial successes (the Jurassic Park
juggernaut alone has earned more than $3.5 billion worldwide). He also
directed seven films (including Westworld, Coma, The Great Train
Robbery)—all of this making Crichton rich beyond the fantasies of most
writers.

He also created video games and the long-running TV show ER. In 1995 he
achieved a breathtaking pop-cultural moment when he had the nation’s No.
1 best-selling book (The Lost World), the No. 1 movie (Congo), and the
No. 1 TV show (ER), a trifecta he repeated in 1996 with Airframe,
Twister, and ER. No one has topped that—not Stephen King, not John
Grisham, not J. K. Rowling. At the height of his career, Crichton was
reportedly earning $100 million a year. His cultural ubiquity was such
that a New Yorker cartoon showed a woman in a bookstore asking, “What
can you recommend that’s not by Michael Crichton?”

Early on, Crichton segued into films, writing screenplays and directing,
admitting that once he had started down that road it was hard to return
to the lonely ordeal of writing novels. He found uncanny success in
television with ER, based on a screenplay, Code Blue, written about his
experiences as a student at Harvard Medical School and years later
developed for television with Steven Spielberg.

He was immensely tall. Six feet nine inches tall. So tall that it was
often a problem for him, beginning at age 13, when he was already over
six feet, weighed a skeletal 125 pounds, and was routinely hounded by
bullies. So tall that he often felt like an outsider, an alien, an Ivy
League oddball, but tall enough that he could see beyond the horizon
before anyone else. Spielberg said that Crichton was the tallest man he
had ever met, and naturally that impressive height—whatever its
drawbacks—gave him a certain added authority on the sets of the seven
films he directed.

TALL ORDERS
Crichton in 1970. Inset, with Steven Spielberg during the filming of 1993’s Jurassic Park.

George Clooney, who credits his long and distinguished career to his
breakout role in ER, said that “Michael was always referred to as a
Renaissance man. That’s because he was so good at so many things.
Doctor. Writer. Director. And he was a stunning six-foot-nine figure. He
would walk in the room and all the rest of us mortals felt somewhat
inadequate. It was something you had to see. He could reduce giant stars
and brilliant directors to little kids looking up to this gentle
giant.”

His intellect was just as intimidating, and his scientific curiosity
certainly made an impression on Hollywood. “He was a stone-cold
genius,” said Michael Douglas, who starred in Coma and Disclosure. “He
really was a gentle giant, very shy but intimidating. This guy was off
the charts as far as intellect was concerned.”

Crichton began his directing career with Westworld. If you haven’t
watched either the 1973 film, starring Richard Benjamin, Yul Brynner,
and James Brolin, or the new cable incarnation on HBO, starring Anthony
Hopkins, Ed Harris, and Evan Rachel Wood, it’s about a vacation theme
park peopled by animatronic creatures so perfect that you can’t readily
tell them apart from humans. Their role is to allow paying guests to act
out any fantasy they wish, including sex, murder, and mayhem, in one of
three realms—the Wild West, the Roman Empire, and Medieval Europe.

When a relentless black-clad gunslinger menacingly played by Yul Brynner
stops following the encoded script and begins killing guests, revenge of
the machine ensues. One of the show-runners of the new HBO series,
Jonathan Nolan (brother of Memento and Dark Knight director Christopher
Nolan), told Rolling Stone he remembered being terrified as a child by
Brynner in the 1973 film.

Richard Benjamin reminisced about being cast as Peter Martin, the
out-of-his-depth guest in Westworld who is pursued by the gunslinger.
“Paula [the actress Paula Prentiss, Benjamin’s wife] and I were in
New York, and we got a phone call from [famed talent agent] Sue
Mengers saying, ‘There’s a movie called Westworld, and I think you
should do it,’ ” he explained. “ ‘It’s Michael Crichton—he’s
brilliant,’ and she hung up the phone.”

Although Westworld was the first feature film Crichton directed,
Benjamin felt that “he knew exactly what he was doing. It went very
smoothly and easily, and he was, you know, this quiet presence, but in
total command. The theme—Don’t trust technology; it’ll go crazy—ran
throughout his work.”

That was indeed Crichton’s idée fixe: our scientific and technological
creations—whether highly sophisticated A.I. or DNA-cloned
dinosaurs—will slip from our control and try to destroy us. It seems
that as a culture we are catching up to Michael Crichton’s dark view of
scientifically enhanced life.

Dragon Teeth

Crichton’s novel Dragon Teeth will be published in May by Harper and is
being adapted for a six-hour television series, to air on the National
Geographic Channel. Co-written by screenwriter Graham Yost (Band of
Brothers, The Pacific) for Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, the series
features two of the great dinosaur-bone hunters of the late 19th
century, Edwin Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. Yost calls their
relationship “the greatest scientific rivalry of all time.”

Yost never actually met Michael Crichton, but they spoke at length on
the phone in 2001, when Amblin considered making a sequel to Twister.
“The idea was there would be a swarm of tornadoes that would hit
Chicago,” recalled Yost, “so we were kicking that around, but then
there was 9/11, and I said, I don’t think anybody wants to see buildings
falling down.”

Crichton with James Brolin, Yul Brynner, and Richard Benjamin on the set of Westworld.

Dragon Teeth is “a big adventure story with science at the heart,”
Yost explained, “and that in many ways sums up a lot of Crichton’s
work. The difference is there isn’t necessarily a dark sort of turn.
There’s no dinosaur eating the patrons. There is the sense of these two
men, Cope and Marsh, and how their rivalry deforms them. And how William
Johnson”—a fictional character Crichton created to tell the
story—“has to navigate between them and find his own life.”

It’s easy to see William Johnson as a stand-in for the author: he’s an
Ivy League student, aware of his entitlement. It wouldn’t be the first
time Crichton wrote a version of himself into his novels and
screenplays. Jeff Goldblum’s character in Jurassic Park is Crichton-like
in some ways: a tall, much-married intellectual, specializing in chaos
theory. He also speaks the movie’s theme, reflecting Crichton’s opinion
about scientific meddling: “Your scientists were so preoccupied with
whether or not they could that they didn’t stop to think if they
should.” And in ER, the character played by Noah Wyle has certain
Crichton-like attributes, so much so that during the run of the show
Wyle drummed up the courage to ask the author if, indeed, he was playing
a version of Michael Crichton. Wyle explained, “I just assumed, since
he wrote it in 1974, after he finished his [time] as a medical
student, and my character was finishing his third-year rotation and
doing his internship in the E.R., [that] I was playing Michael. And
when I broached that to him, he kind of smiled and said that he felt he
was a composite of all of the characters. Burst my bubble!”

Despite Crichton’s vague demurral, Wyle admitted that he used Crichton
“as a bit of a prototype for the character—the idea of this really
smart guy choosing to put himself in less than savory circumstances,
both for his education but also to test his mettle.”

The Spielberg Collaboration

Kathleen Kennedy—co-founder of Amblin Entertainment in 1982 and now
president of Lucasfilm—who produced Jurassic Park, Congo, Twister, and
others, explained, “I always say Michael Crichton [wrote] science
fact, not science fiction. He was deeply interested in what was going on
with technology and scientific experiments, but he always seemed to find
a way to make complex ideas very accessible because he found a way to
talk about them through big entertainment.”

When asked about Crichton’s enormous output, Kennedy answered, “He was
incredibly driven. I think more of it just came from this insatiable
desire to understand these complex ideas and where technology was going,
where medicine was going, or science was headed.”

Spielberg noted that “Michael brought credibility to incredible subject
matter. He was a master builder of a scientific logic to keep the
science fiction grounded so it could be believed by people all over the
world. And I had not met anybody who had ever done that before. And he
did it over and over again in a lot of films and books. I’ve always
believed that the more incredible your stories, the more credible the
science has to be.”

Spielberg recalled that he was beginning a seven-year contract as a
television director for Universal when he first met Crichton, after
being asked to give the author a tour of Universal Studios. Crichton had
just sold The Andromeda Strain to Universal.

“I remember I did all the talking because Michael hardly said a word,”
Spielberg recalled. “He was very shy, he was very reticent to get into
a conversation, but he seemed to be taking everything in, and he seemed
to be acting with interest at everything I was pointing out to him, like
Lana Turner’s dressing room or Alfred Hitchcock’s office or Western
Street, where they made [the television series] Wagon Train. And he
was agog the whole day that we spent together, and we often talked about
it when we became engaged in a professional collaboration.”

They became friends, and one day Crichton called Spielberg and said, “I
want you to read a first draft of something I’ve written, kind of about
myself when I wanted to be a doctor.” It was the 150-page Code Blue
screenplay, and Spielberg loved it and committed to directing it. “I
mean, you couldn’t catch your breath trying to keep up with him when you
were blazing through the pages [of his screenplays and
books]. . . When he [later] co-wrote Twister for me, I probably
read that script in an hour, and I’m a slow reader, and I was blazing
through it.

“Michael and I started working on the re-writes,” Spielberg recalled,
“and I didn’t know much about medicine, except—well, I knew as much
about medicine as any hypochondriac knows, which is often more than the
doctors. And Michael respected how much I knew about medicine, based on
my fear of everything that could go wrong.”

Over lunch, Spielberg asked what else he was working on, and Crichton
said “he couldn’t tell me, it was a secret project, but I kind of
wouldn’t let it go. And after a couple of days, Michael, swearing me to
secrecy, said, ‘O.K., it’s a book about dinosaurs and DNA.’ And that’s
all he would tell me. And I wouldn’t give it up, so I finally got him
after several weeks to tell me pretty much the whole story. When he
finished telling me, I committed to direct it . . . . I probably had
one of the best times of my career directing that script.”

Crichton with Sean Connery on the set of 1979’s The Great Train Robbery (right), working on the same film with Donald Sutherland and Connery (left).

The Archives

The late writer’s vast archive is examined and catalogued in a house
that Crichton owned in Santa Monica. In the kitchen is a large
photograph of Alfred Hitchcock autographed to Crichton, in the living
room a display of Crichton’s books, posters for the movies,
advertisements for the books, the Time magazine cover from September
1995, and a script for ER, signed by members of the cast, preserved in a
Plexiglas frame.

In a large room next to the kitchen, the writer’s widow, Sherri
Alexander Crichton, and two assistants had laid out on three long tables
samples of her late husband’s letters, original scripts, postcards, and
manuscripts. White cotton gloves were available in case we wanted to
handle any of the material.

Sherri, a graceful former model, first met Crichton a year after she’d
moved to Los Angeles from New York when a friend of his set them up on a
date. “Sherri, you guys have so much in common,” the friend encouraged
her. “I said, ‘What’s that?’ He said, ‘You’re both tall.’ ” (She is
five feet eleven.) Sherri expected to have many more years with her
husband, but, tragically, he died three years into the marriage, leaving
her alone and six months pregnant with their son, John Michael, and the
archives of his vast empire. (Michael Crichton also has a daughter in
her late 20s, by his fourth wife.)

“The archive was always very important to me,” she said, “because if
it didn’t get preserved now it was never going to get preserved. Life
passes on. Michael’s books would hopefully still be in print, but maybe
not, if there’s not someone there who cares, advocating for them.

“Michael always charted everything,” she added. “This year he did
this; this year he did that. There are some like Dragon Teeth that are
fully formed, pure Crichton. Then there are pieces that are just
ideas.” So we take a look at Crichton’s idea files, which fill five
cabinet drawers and which are in the process of being organized and
scanned. The sheer range of his interests is dizzying: anthropology,
astrology, bacteria, Bali, bats, biochemistry, breeding, cancer, chaos,
cloning, computer hackers, criminal investigation, Degas, dinosaurs,
DNA, dreams, Eastern European politics, electric cars, evolution, gene
patents, hypnosis, language, medicine, opera, parenting, photos, plants,
population control, voodoo, sharks, solar systems, sleep.

Crichton applied the scientific method even to his decision to become a
writer. Sherri recounted that, when starting out, Crichton “researched
and discovered that there were only 200 writers in America who were
making a living out of writing. But there were 6,000 students graduated
as doctors. He was being very pragmatic about it. That’s when he decided
to become a doctor and went undercover as a writer.”

His first novels, paperback pulp thrillers written while at Harvard
Medical School, were published under two pseudonyms: John Lange (John
was Crichton’s first name, which he didn’t use, and Andrew Lang was a
collector of Victorian fairy tales) and Jeffrey Hudson (a dwarf at the
court of Charles I who also happened to be a great adventurer—a kind
of fun-house mirror image of Crichton himself).

Yet, for a writer with so many interests who wrote so many books,
Crichton rarely talked or wrote about himself. A notable exception is
Travels, his 1988 collection of nonfiction pieces, where you glimpse his
insecurities, his self-doubt, his occasional feelings of being a freak
due to his height, and his intellect. You see his anger and hurt over
his domineering and often competitive father, John Crichton, a New York
journalist and executive working for Advertising Age.

Michael was flourishing in the 1970s, living in Los Angeles and rich as
Croesus, but he was haunted by memories of a childhood traumatized by
his father’s abuse. Crichton sought to rid himself of those memories and
come to terms—even forgiveness—with the ghost of his father.

In Travels, Crichton recounts immersing himself in the world of psychic
phenomena, which he approached with an open and critical mind; he tells
several tales of derring-do, such as climbing to the top of Mount
Kilimanjaro, meeting the Semai tribe in Pahang, and diving on a
dangerous wreck off Bonaire, near the coast of Venezuela. Perhaps that’s
why he greatly admired another grand adventurer, Sean Connery—the best
James Bond ever, whom Crichton directed in The Great Train Robbery. He was among Crichton’s closest friends from his life in
the movies.

Sherri pulled out a carefully numbered box with photographs from the set
of The Great Train Robbery. One was of Sean Connery sitting atop one of
the movie’s specially built Victorian railcars, with Crichton tenderly
removing a cinder from the actor’s eye. Connery appeared in the movie
about “10 or 15 years” after he finished playing Bond, Crichton
explained in his commentary, recorded in 1996, that accompanies the DVD
of The Great Train Robbery. He considered Connery “one of the few real
international movie stars who is able to also be a character. Psycho
really ended [Tony Perkins’s] working life. He could never play
anything but a crazy person again, really,” whereas Sean Connery,
Crichton felt, “has very carefully enlarged the scope of his work
[since Bond]. He’s a very skilled actor, and not entirely recognized
for his ability.”

In one of his interviews with PBS talk-show host Charlie Rose, Crichton
described his admiration for Connery: “I think of him as a complete
person. He has his adult side and his childish side, his male and his
female side. He has everything . . . . He has this wonderful
spirit . . . . He’s one of the few people in the world that I would say
is delightful.” (When contacted by V.F. for an interview, Connery said
that, regretfully, he was not up to it.)

Michael Crichton, in 2000.

By Jonathan Exley/Contour/Getty Images.

The Controversies

One needs only to look at the sheer number of books and movie tickets
sold to get an idea of how popular—even beloved—Crichton was
throughout his 40-year career. But there was controversy as well, in the
wake of three novels that took on heat-generating topics: Disclosure
(feminism and sexual harassment), Rising Sun (Japanese corporate
domination of technology), and State of Fear (global warming). The last
takes a jaded look at the politics of climate-change science and has as
its villains a group of environmental activists. He got hate mail after
State of Fear was published to mostly negative reviews.

“He was ready for the ridicule; he was ready for the conversation,”
said Sherri, when asked about why Crichton tackled this subject in the
way that he did. “He challenged science and the models.”

Spielberg believes that when the book was written the science wasn’t as
settled as it is now, and what Crichton was really arguing for was a
less emotional approach to the topic. When the book came out, “people
were not talking about global warming. And I think Michael was trying to
shake things up and get people to listen, and I think he had to go out
on a limb to get people to pay attention.”

On Charlie Rose’s show, Crichton described environmentalism as a kind of
religion and argued for a coolheaded approach to the subject. When asked
about the writer’s conservative views in this area, Charlie Rose said,
“I would hope that Michael would look at the world today and say,
Whatever I did in terms of creating that piece, we’re living in a
different world, and I see more evidence—and it is one of the great
challenges in our world that I see now. At least I hope he would say
that.”

Paul Lazarus, producer of the original Westworld and Crichton’s closest
friend during his early years in Hollywood, and currently on the faculty
of Santa Fe University of Art & Design, recalled a long discussion he
had with Crichton about the issue. He remembers telling him, “Michael,
you’re on the wrong side of history on this one.”

‘There were two obituaries that appeared in The New York Times following
Michael’s death,” recalled Lazarus. “One was on the obituary page,
which gave a straightforward account of his life, and then he got one on
the literary page, which took him to task for not writing profound
novels . . . and I thought, How terribly unfair. He was a popularizer
along the lines of Isaac Asimov. You look at Jurassic Park. I remember a
few pages on string theory, and thinking, Oh, I finally understand it.
But I didn’t understand it at all—his genius was making you think you
understood.”

The New York Times had written, “As a writer he was a kind of cyborg,
tirelessly turning out novels that were intricately engineered
entertainment systems. No one—except possibly Mr. Crichton
himself—ever confused them with great literature, but very few readers
who started a Crichton novel ever put it down.”

Actually, Crichton never did confuse his novels with great literature.
He knew he was not a writer’s writer. He told Charlie Rose, “My
experience is of not being very gifted at writing, and of having to try
really hard, to work very hard at what I do, to put in long hours and to
concentrate on it . . . . I don’t feel in any way that I have natural
abilities in this, and I just work hard. This is something I wanted to
do—I wanted to be a writer, and I’m very happy to be doing it.”

Crichton insisted that his books and movies were built upon
“pre-existing literary forms,” which he would study before embarking
on his own reiteration, going about it scientifically. Congo owed a debt
to Sir H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines, and The Andromeda Strain
to H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds. Mary Shelley’s creature in
Frankenstein was a model for the Terminal Man. Crichton’s 1976 novel,
Eaters of the Dead, owes a debt to Beowulf.

“I think that gnawed at Michael a little bit,” said author Max Byrd, a
longtime friend of Crichton’s from their undergraduate days at Harvard,
“that if you were popular you can’t be very good . . . . Michael kept
talking about Charles Dickens—Dickens was both popular and good. It
vexed him when people would just say, ‘Well, a pop writer or a pop
scientist.’ He knew the subjects; he knew the subjects he went into
better than just ‘pop.’ ”

Distinguished editor Robert Gottlieb worked on Crichton’s novels while
at Alfred A. Knopf. In his 2016 memoir, Avid Reader, excerpted in the
September 2016 issue of V.F., Gottlieb recalls, “Michael had a strong
background in science. And he had a keen eye, or nose, for cutting-edge
areas of science—and, later, sociology—that could be used as
material for thrillers while cleverly popularizing the hard stuff for
the general public. You got a lesson while you were being scared. What
Michael wasn’t was a very good writer. The Andromeda Strain was a
terrific concept, but . . . eventually I concluded that he couldn’t
write about people because they just didn’t interest him.” Gottlieb
adds, “Michael, for all his weaknesses as a writer, was unquestionably
the best of his techno breed, and easily deserved his tremendous
success.”

Still, Crichton was plagued by feelings that his books all fell short of
the mark. “I’ve never worked on anything, either a book or a movie,
without, in some really deep way, feeling disappointed in
myself—feeling that I missed it,” he admitted in his Great Train
Robbery commentary.

He felt the same way about the movies he directed: “The filmmaker
thinks that he’s making one picture, the production unit thinks they’re
making another picture, and then you run it in front of an audience and
it becomes their picture.” At the end of the commentary comes this
confession from a man of such extraordinary accomplishments: “The
feeling I have working on a picture inevitably is when you see it put
together, you just want to go out and kill yourself . . . . Whenever
you start a movie, you have the most wonderful idea in your head. It’s
just magical, and glowing, and fantastic. And then, as you’re shooting
it, there’s a continuous addressing of practical problems—people get
sick, things break down, it’s raining, it’s too bright, it’s too dark,
it’s too early, it’s too late. And then at the end you see it all
together and it’s just a movie. That’s all. The wonderful quality that
was in your head isn’t there. It’s evaporated. Instead it’s just this
rather mundane experience and you’ve failed. You have absolutely failed.
So you go make another movie, and you hope you’ll get it the next
time.”

But Charlie Rose felt that Crichton “had this really remarkable ability
to see the gathering force of an idea and then write to it. I think
Michael understood that that criticism would be there. I don’t think he
thought he was creating great literature. I think he saw himself as
someone who was finding a way to tell stories about his own curiosity,
and it happened to be very entertaining to other people.”

“He left a huge legacy,” says Spielberg. “Michael had a special
imagination different from most other writers’. And I think that he’s
got a lot of unhatched eggs, you know, and rather than let them sit
around and fossilize like amber, we’d like to get those stories out to
the world while they’re still fresh.” In addition to Dragon Teeth,
Spielberg is adapting for film two other posthumously published novels
by Crichton, Pirate Latitudes and Micro.

Paul Lazarus noticed that at the end of Crichton’s life he finally came
to wear his success and his fame lightly. “He also became much more
comfortable around people,” Lazarus says. “You would see him on the
morning talk shows or being interviewed—he was smiling. He was easy
with them. That’s not who he was initially.”

During Crichton’s last summer, Lazarus invited him to address a handful
of film students he had brought to U.C.L.A. “Michael,” he remembers
saying, “you’re not looking very well,” and his friend answered,
“Well, I’m really very sick.” But he insisted on going to the class.
And he stayed for more than three hours answering questions. According
to Lazarus, he was wonderful, with that sneakily shy sense of humor.

Charlie Rose summed up the feeling that has remained with many of
Crichton’s admirers: “Among the 25 people I’ve enjoyed most, he’s high
on the list. He was a great storyteller. I miss him.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the director of Rising Sun. Philip Kaufman directed the film.

Behind-the-Scenes Photos of ILM’s Greats: Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, E.T., and Beyond

“Here, stop-motion master animator Phil Tippett [center], Mike Pangrazio [right], and I stand between two incredible matte paintings used to depict the windswept snowscape of Hoth. Pangrazio, a legendary I.L.M. artist, painted many such paintings during the production of The Empire Strike Back to allow for scenic vistas, practical sets to be extended, or, in this case, a stop-motion puppet of a Tauntaun and rider to be inserted for a story point.”

“While a number of complex approaches were considered and tested to realize the ghosts that appear at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, it was model-maker Steve Gawley’s idea to shoot the silken ghost puppets in a tank of water that yielded the haunting realism that Steven [Spielberg] was after.”

“The melting of Toht, the Nazi villain’s head in Raiders of the Lost Ark, required an innovative approach. After a brainstorming session, it was decided that the head would be sculpted in wax. Artist Chris Walas meticulously added layer upon layer of various color waxes, building each of the underlying forms up until the final face took shape. Filmed at a speed slower than normal, high heat was applied and the head appears to melt rapidly revealing layers of skin, muscle, and bone when played back at normal speed.”

“Photographing E.T.’s ship posed a considerable challenge. Due to budgetary constraints, we were limited in the scale at which we could build the ship so it ended up being quite small. Adding to that, Steven wanted the ship to be highly reflective so we had to use huge cards to reflect the warm sky into the ship. We also filmed the miniature at 120 frames per second to give the ship a sense of mass.”

“In this shot, E.T. is on a hilltop overlooking the city. We realized the shot using a combination of a miniature set in the foreground and a matte painting in the background for the city. E.T. was a small puppet mounted to a rod that slid down a track, which gave the appearance that he was walking down the hillside toward the city. A lot of what makes this shot successful is the lighting and composition. The foreground looks a bit foreboding, whereas the cityscape has an almost magical quality about it. Hundreds of twinkling lights beckon him. In a way, it reflects what E.T. is feeling at this point in the story.”

“Terminator 2 was a breakthrough film in many ways, but the digital effects saw a number of impressive breakthroughs. The sequence where Robert Patrick as the T-1000 walks through the security bars was particularly challenging. In order to have Robert’s face and torso warp and bend around the bars, we developed new software called ‘Makesticky.’ The software allowed us to map footage—in this case, the texture of Robert Patrick—onto a C.G. model without it sliding around on the surface and deform it as necessary. We shot Robert alone without the bars, then bars by itself, as well, and combined all three elements digitally into the final shot you see.”

“One of the things that really sells a shot like this one of the raptors in the kitchen is lighting. We worked closely with Steven to use very dramatic cross-lighting, intentionally playing some parts of the creatures in shadow to retain a sense of mystery. You really weren’t sure what they were going to do next. We used eye lights to make sure we could read their eye movements—they really are the windows to the soul.”

“Here, stop-motion master animator Phil Tippett [center], Mike Pangrazio [right], and I stand between two incredible matte paintings used to depict the windswept snowscape of Hoth. Pangrazio, a legendary I.L.M. artist, painted many such paintings during the production of The Empire Strike Back to allow for scenic vistas, practical sets to be extended, or, in this case, a stop-motion puppet of a Tauntaun and rider to be inserted for a story point.”

“While a number of complex approaches were considered and tested to realize the ghosts that appear at the climax of Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the end, it was model-maker Steve Gawley’s idea to shoot the silken ghost puppets in a tank of water that yielded the haunting realism that Steven [Spielberg] was after.”

“The melting of Toht, the Nazi villain’s head in Raiders of the Lost Ark, required an innovative approach. After a brainstorming session, it was decided that the head would be sculpted in wax. Artist Chris Walas meticulously added layer upon layer of various color waxes, building each of the underlying forms up until the final face took shape. Filmed at a speed slower than normal, high heat was applied and the head appears to melt rapidly revealing layers of skin, muscle, and bone when played back at normal speed.”

“Photographing E.T.’s ship posed a considerable challenge. Due to budgetary constraints, we were limited in the scale at which we could build the ship so it ended up being quite small. Adding to that, Steven wanted the ship to be highly reflective so we had to use huge cards to reflect the warm sky into the ship. We also filmed the miniature at 120 frames per second to give the ship a sense of mass.”

“In this shot, E.T. is on a hilltop overlooking the city. We realized the shot using a combination of a miniature set in the foreground and a matte painting in the background for the city. E.T. was a small puppet mounted to a rod that slid down a track, which gave the appearance that he was walking down the hillside toward the city. A lot of what makes this shot successful is the lighting and composition. The foreground looks a bit foreboding, whereas the cityscape has an almost magical quality about it. Hundreds of twinkling lights beckon him. In a way, it reflects what E.T. is feeling at this point in the story.”

“Terminator 2 was a breakthrough film in many ways, but the digital effects saw a number of impressive breakthroughs. The sequence where Robert Patrick as the T-1000 walks through the security bars was particularly challenging. In order to have Robert’s face and torso warp and bend around the bars, we developed new software called ‘Makesticky.’ The software allowed us to map footage—in this case, the texture of Robert Patrick—onto a C.G. model without it sliding around on the surface and deform it as necessary. We shot Robert alone without the bars, then bars by itself, as well, and combined all three elements digitally into the final shot you see.”

“One of the things that really sells a shot like this one of the raptors in the kitchen is lighting. We worked closely with Steven to use very dramatic cross-lighting, intentionally playing some parts of the creatures in shadow to retain a sense of mystery. You really weren’t sure what they were going to do next. We used eye lights to make sure we could read their eye movements—they really are the windows to the soul.”